


Fate Finds A Way

by grilledcheesing



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, Hurt Peter, Peter Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 10:58:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11712993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grilledcheesing/pseuds/grilledcheesing
Summary: Peter Parker was an accident; not one of the five people tasked with taking care of him were prepared. But that didn't make him any less loved.An examination of Peter's childhood, and a certain billionaire's planet-sized guilt complex.





	Fate Finds A Way

On Sunday, Richard calls her from Los Angeles. He leaves a voicemail on her machine. Mary doesn’t listen to it.

 

On Monday, Mary stops at the drugstore after work. She buys a pregnancy test and a bag of M&Ms. She spends the night eating her way through the bag, crying, and staring at two little lines that should belong to anyone else. 

 

On Tuesday, Mary sleeps in past her alarm. She scrambles into her clothes; she’s 22 and it’s a new job and she can’t afford to fuck this up. She walks out of the subway to dust and smoke and screaming. She’s right there in the minutes after it happens, but in all the chaos on the ground, most of the world watching from their televisions knows what it is before she does — the World Trade Towers are burning to the ground. There's no 20th floor for her to report to; everything is gone. 

 

There’s no subway home after that; she, like the rest of New York, has to walk home. It takes hours and hours to cross the bridge to Brooklyn. Hours of breathing in smoke and hearing people bawl into cell phones that don’t have any service and touching her stomach and thinking _oh my god oh my god oh my god_ because she has never been late for anything in her entire life except for her period this month, and work this morning, and that may be the only reason that she isn’t dead.

 

She doesn’t stop in Brooklyn, though. She carries on to Queens. She finds herself on the doorstep of the apartment Richard used to share with his brother Ben, before the fight, before he moved out to the west coast last month. But Ben isn’t there. It’s his girlfriend May who opens the door.

 

May takes one look at her standing there, all grimy and soot-covered and barefoot from taking off her heels halfway home, and bursts into tears.

 

“Thank god,” she says, pulling Mary into the tightest hug she’s ever had in her life; and then Mary is crying too, in earnest now, because the world is upside down and yesterday she was worried about so many things that seemed so impossible and so big and now they just seem selfish and petty and small.

 

“I’m sorry,” says Mary. “I didn’t know where else to go. Is Ben — ?”

 

May pulls her inside. “Ben’s at work, he’s fine, we’re fine,” says May quickly, already taking her shoes from her, her bag, the ratty sweater tied around her waist. “Oh my god, Mary, we thought you were dead.”

 

 _I should be_. She can’t stop crying. Her whole body is shaking. _I should be dead._

 

May frets over her in that older sister way she has for the two years Mary has known her; she’s a few years older, closer to Richard’s age than Mary’s, but grounded in a way Mary feels like she’ll never be.

 

After Mary takes a shower and changes into some of May’s pajamas and settles on the couch to watch the news coverage, May wordlessly sets down two shot glasses and pours. She hands one to Mary. Mary stares down at the clear liquid and then, without meaning to, makes a choice.

 

“I’m pregnant,” she blurts. And then: “It’s not Richard’s.”

 

May’s face Is a mirror of the same sympathy she has seen her whole life; _poor little Mary._ Her parents are dead. Her life is a mess. The one good thing she had moved to Los Angeles and didn’t take her with him. And now she is pregnant by the last man on earth who should be raising a child.

 

“Oh, honey,” says May. “C’mere.”

 

And she holds Mary and lets her cry and tells her it’s going to be okay, that they’ll figure it out, that she’ll hold her hand if she gets the abortion and hold her hand if she has the kid and that everything’s going to be fine, and Mary cries and cries and feels more rotten than ever for crying over this new life when so many people’s lives ended today.

 

She ends up staying the night, and then the next night, and the night after that. May and Ben are as kind and patient as ever, and it makes her heart ache, because this was her little family until the breakup and it’s been _weeks_ of feeling untethered and unloved, so long that it almost hurts to let herself be here again.

 

But then Richard flies in a few days later, the first flight he can get. He’s at the door of the apartment within an hour of his plane landing. They don’t talk about the fight they had a month ago, before he left for his residency; they don’t talk about anything that’s happened since. He kisses her like a dead man brought back to life and makes too many promises, but it’s Richard, and she knows that he’ll keep them all.

 

She’s about to tell him, but then he presses a hand to her stomach. She closes her eyes in dismay. Ben must have said something over the phone.

 

“I love you,” he says. It’s a different kind of _I love you_ than the ones she is used to hearing. It’s heavier. More permanent. And in that same brash, determined Richard Parker way, he says, “This kid, too. If you’ll let me.”

 

It seems crazy to say yes so quickly, after everything they’ve been through; but looking into his earnest eyes and hearing the weight of his words and seeing the impossible length of her life spread out before her in this new and terrifying way, it seems even crazier to say no.

 

* * *

 

Richard is raising a miniature dumpster diver.

 

“Dad dad dad dad.” He wonders if he’ll ever get used to the reverence in that piping little voice. “I found this in the garbage outside the Y. Do you think we can fix it?”

 

It’s a broken Walkman. Peter holds it out to him like he just found a cure for cancer. Richard examines it in all of its defunct, outdated glory and sets it down on his work desk.

 

“Let’s see what we can do, bud.”

 

Peter grins that ridiculously inexhaustible grin at him, the one he reserves for whenever they’re about to build something or gut something. Even at five he is curiously and specifically precocious; he loves technology, loves anything tactile, anything he can make or alter or turn into something new. As a doctor Richard has on more than one occasion attempted to curb him toward more biological pursuits, but the kid is insatiable and cannot be diverted. 

 

They start at the library; they have a computer at home, of course, but Peter’s always so excited to see the librarians and run around the park outside that any excuse is a good one. They Google repair how-tos and Peter squints at them and Richard translates the parts that go over his head, and they take their printouts outside to fiddle with it.

 

“He looks just like you,” one of the librarians fawns as Peter dashes past.

 

Richard beams. It’s true, even if it isn’t strictly true. And besides, it’s better than the usual, “Aren’t you a little _young?_ ” that he and May usually get from strangers.

 

And admittedly, they are — at least by New York standards. It hasn’t been easy. After Peter was born Mary took a job in finance that helps them along, but Richard’s med school loan debts are crippling, and he won’t see the other side of them until Peter’s in junior high. Some months they’re barely able to make rent. Their one and only godsend is that May and Ben are close and able to watch Peter in a pinch. He doesn’t know how they would have survived the years before preschool without them.

 

Peter finds a little spot in the grass and plops himself down unceremoniously, pulling a screwdriver Richard didn’t even know he had out of the pocket of his shorts. It’s these moments of intense focus, the few moments when Peter is actually quiet for more than a minute at a time, that Richard sees it — whatever _it_ is. That separateness. That _other_. That inevitable truth that, although Richard is his dad (his “Dad dad dad dad!” more often than not), it’s not his blood running through Peter’s veins.

 

It doesn’t bother him. It really never has. But it is a constant source of curiosity; when Peter tilts his head like that, is it Mary, or is it _him?_ When Peter refuses to sleep at night, too excited and curious about the world to put himself in a bed, whose eyes are blinking behind his lids? When Peter gets a little older and more distinct and set in his ways, which person does Richard get to blame? 

 

Richard and Peter like to know how things work. It’s what they have most in common. And though Peter is the person that Richard loves most in the world, a huge part of that is accepting that there is half of him that he will never fully understand.

 

“You think it’s good to go?” asks Peter excitedly, when they snap it shut again.

 

“Give it a whirl,” says Richard.

 

Peter hits play, and the angsty, discordant tones of “You Oughta Know” start blasting through the park, and his eyes light up like Christmas.

 

“It’s that song mom won’t let me listen to on the radio!” Peter crows.

 

Richard sees the other parents side-eyeing him by the swing and gently takes it from Peter. “Uh … yeah. How about we listen to it in the car?”

 

“Cool!” says Peter, unquestioning as ever.

 

Peter practically sprints to the car, looking back every so often to make sure Richard is following. Richard pulls a face at him every time he looks back, until Peter’s in a fit of giggles and hiccuping so hard his little head keeps bobbling in the backseat as Richard drives them home to the sound of Alanis Morisette’s heartbreak.

 

Richard doesn’t spare many thoughts for Peter’s biological father, whoever he is — but he does, occasionally, in moments like this. The man doesn’t know what he’s missing.

 

* * *

 

May never wanted kids. She didn’t play MASH with the other girls on the schoolyard. She never chose baby names. When Ben got down on one knee, it should have been a romantic moment, but instead she blurted, “I don’t want kids” in a crowded restaurant full of people and made Ben laugh so hard that he nearly knocked over a chair.

 

Now May has a kid.

 

The night after the accident, when they finally manage to put Peter to sleep in the spare room, May’s grief is punctured by a memory; she can see Mary as clear as day, some nine years earlier and freshly graduated from college, bawling as she told May about the pregnancy. How May felt an immediate sympathy, chased by an unhelpful sense of relief: this would never, ever happen to her.

 

“I know this isn’t what you signed up for,” says Ben lowly, as they’re laying in bed that night.

 

It isn’t. But it doesn’t make her next words any less true: “I would die before I watched that kid get handed to anyone else.”

 

Ben seems to startle for a moment, and May reminds herself: she is now the only person left alive who knows exactly who “ _anybody else_ ” is.

 

In some ways, taking on Peter is easy. She loves the shit out of him. She has since he was a bundle of cells. She has never met a kid as earnest or mischievous or _fun_ as Peter — she was never not bummed when Richard or Mary came to pick him up after work, because before Peter could even talk the two of them were partners in crime.

 

In other ways, though, it’s hard as hell. She and Ben are suddenly responsible for _everything_ — this ridiculously smart kid and his whole future. It’s not just the schedule change and keeping him fed and happy and whole, it’s ten more years of him under their roof and a _lifetime_ of responsibility, of advice giving, of helping with homework she doesn’t understand as a grownass woman.

 

She’s so afraid she’s going to fuck it up. So afraid she’s going to fuck _him_ up. She finds herself unconsciously keeping him not quite at arm’s length, but at a length she feels guilty enough to lose sleep over; at first it’s Ben who soothes most of the tears, Ben who gives the long talks about bullies, Ben who pushes for Peter to enroll in a magnet school, and May who watches on the sidelines with the best of intentions and no idea how to execute them.

 

They don’t talk much about Peter’s parents, at least not in the early months after it happens. She thinks they are all afraid of being the one to bring it up; Ben doesn’t want to hurt Peter, Peter doesn’t want to hurt Ben, and May is frozen somewhere in her own grief trying to balance the weight of theirs along with it.

 

Slowly, painfully, she starts to understand what the root of it is; she is terrified at the idea of seeming like she is trying to replace Mary. She can’t do that to Peter. She can’t do it to herself.

 

It comes to an inevitable head about six weeks in.

 

“Oh, shit, I mean shoot, I mean — you forgot your lunch,” calls May, when Peter’s halfway out the door.

 

“Oh,” says Peter, bounding back into the kitchen. “Thanks, Mom.”

 

May’s heart sticks in her throat, and she’s not the only one. Peter looks stricken the beat after it happens, almost guilty. Like he knows. Like he’s known from the moment he turned up on their doorstep how unwanted he was; like it’s been beating in his little heart since before he was born.

 

His whole face flushes from his neck to his ears. “I mean … I … ”

 

May doesn’t say anything. Just leans down and wraps his wiry kid body into hers, running a hand through the mop of his curls, waiting for the few moments it takes for him to ease into her. And then he does, holding onto her so tight that she feels like the last life jacket on a sinking ship. She feels his little chest shuddering and something in her _splinters_ and for the first time, she lets herself feel it — the full and unstoppable truth of it. This kid who shares no blood of hers — or truly, even her husband’s — is more family to her than anyone who has come before.

 

“You’re my kid, okay?” she tells him. “You always have been. Doesn’t matter what we call it.”

 

He nods into her chest and swallows down this little whimper that just about breaks her heart, and she squeezes him hard enough to break him. She doesn’t know how long she and Peter stand there clinging to each other, only that at some point his shoulders stop shaking and and his breathing evens out and by the time she pulls away and wipes the mess of tears and snot off his face she realizes isn’t scared of this anymore. Maybe they’ll fuck up, and maybe they won’t. All she can do with Peter is all that she’s ever done — try her damned hardest, and pray that it’s good enough.

 

* * *

 

By dinnertime Ben is uncharacteristically irritable. Two of his friends were let go from work; he’s mad on their behalves, and worried on his own. The weekend is going to be spent applying for new jobs, the next few weeks spent in a state of semi-panic that he hadn’t anticipated in a career as stable as his had seemed; he doesn’t want to break it to May, who’s already stressed about money, and certainly not Peter, who keeps attempting to insert himself into being stressed about anything May seems to be stressed over.

 

May knows something is up. She reaches forward at the kitchen table halfway through dinner, nudging Ben on the elbow.

 

Ben blinks himself back into the present. “Peter, you’ve barely touched your food," he says. 

 

Peter stares down at his plate of lasagna. “Actually, I … don’t feel great,” says Peter.

 

Ben narrows his eyes at Peter. “Hmm. Seems like a curious problem to have on the night it’s your turn to do the dishes.”

 

But Peter isn’t defensive about it, just smiles a little weakly and says, “I’ll grab them when you guys are done and stick mine in the fridge for later.”

 

May presses a hand to Peter’s forehead. “Go lay down, baby,” she says with a frown.

 

“Oh, I’m — I’m fine, I can get the dishes and …”

 

“We’ll take care of it, Pete, listen to your aunt,” says Ben, a bit apologetically.

 

Peter is a little slow to rise, a little bit clumsy on his feet.

 

“That OsCorp field trip did you in, huh?” asks May, her concerned eyes following him as he makes his way across the room.

 

Peter laughs. “Yeah. All that unadulterated, unfiltered science broke my brain.”

 

He closes the door behind him, which is a bit unusual, but Ben isn’t really in the frame of mind to be noting unusual things. He and May eat in silence for a bit more, and she puts her hand on his under the table, and he squeezes it back. It’s as close as he plans on getting to telling her until he has another job lined up.

 

He and May clear the table and put aside Peter’s leftovers and settle in on the couch.

 

“Peter, we’re gonna watch a movie,” May calls.

 

No answer.

 

May gets up and knocks on his door, waits a few seconds, and mouths the words “I’m just gonna check up on him” before creaking the door open a few inches and sliding in after the coast appears to be clear.

 

“Peter?”

 

Ben’s muscles are already stiff and poised to get up just from the tone of May’s voice.

 

“Peter, honey, wake up.” And then, too quickly, with panic bubbling in her voice: “Ben? Ben, get in here.”

 

Ben’s already at the door.

 

“ _Ben!_ ”

 

He rushes in to find May kneeling beside Peter’s bed, both of her hands on his face, on his shoulders, pressing back his hair: “I can’t wake him up, he won’t wake up Ben, I can’t, I don’t know — “

 

There is a brief second, looking at the grey tinge of Peter’s face, that Ben wants to give in to a panic of his own. But he slides away from it with the practice and efficiency that comes with being a former emergency responder, even though this time it’s really, really damn hard.

 

“Let me look at him, honey,” he says to May, gently prompting her to move. She pulls her hands off his face with a stunned little gasp and lets him take her place.

 

“Pete?” says Ben lowly. The kid’s lips are bloodless, his skin ice clammy and ice cold. Ben presses a hand to the his forehead, putting some pressure on it, waiting for his eyes to flutter open or some othe sign that he’s conscious, but Peter doesn’t so much as shiver. Ben swallows another wave of panic and gently pulls up one of the kid’s eyelids — his pupils are so wide that they’re shot. No, they’re rolling into the back of his head. He’s never seen anything like this before in his life.

 

“May,” he says as calmly as he can, “call an ambulance.”

 

“Right,” she says at once, knocking over half a dozen things in the room as she scrambles to her feet. “Oh my god, oh my god …”

 

Ben presses to fingers to Peter’s neck, holding his own breath until he feels the weak, erratic heartbeat, so frail that it is almost undetectable. Every now and then Peter sucks in half a breath, like he’s drowning on dry land.

 

“You’re gonna be alright, Pete, you hear me?” says Ben in a measured voice. “I know you’re scared, but we’re gonna take care of it. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

 

But Peter doesn’t even acknowledge him, looking too small and too far gone to possibly be the same 14-year-old kid who swiped a sip of his coffee on the way out the door this morning, the same 14-year-old kid who was bubbling over with enthusiasm about a new _Star Wars_ theory an hour before. This can’t have happened all at once. Were they just distracted? How the hell did this escalate so impossibly fast?

 

Ben doesn’t hear any little gasps from Peter after that, and instinct takes over. He scoops Peter up —  _please not our kid, anybody but our kid_ — and makes his way over to the door.

 

“Grab the insurance cards and our IDs,” says Ben, or some version of Ben that doesn’t feel like it’s being pulled inside out from his own heart.

 

May, whose jaw was dropped in horror watching him haul Peter out, jumps back to attention. “Yes, yes, of course.”

 

Peter’s head lolls on Ben’s shoulder and Ben clutches him tighter. “Hold on, Pete.”

 

They can only take one person with the ambulance when it arrives — “Go, go, I’ll follow behind,” says May, already making a break for the side street where she last parked the car. Ben watches in mute horror as they strap an oxygen mask to Peter’s face, as they shout the precarious vitals back and forth at each other, as the tiny world Ben has revolved around since the day Peter was born collapses in on itself like a nightmare he can’t wake up from.

 

He holds it together until they get to the hospital and wheel him into the emergency room and tell him he can’t follow. Then he walks back out the doors to the entrance, puts his head in his hands, and for the first time since his brother and sister-in-law died, he cries.

 

May arrives with tears streaking down her cheeks and a piece of paper in her hands. Ben doesn’t say anything about it, and neither does she — not until the doctor comes out and tells them that Peter isn’t breathing on his own, that they have no idea how to treat his bizarre symptoms and have put him in a medically induced coma to try to bide some time. Ben turns to May, expecting her to be a puddle, but instead she turns to him with a grim kind of resolve.

 

“I think … I think we have to tell his father.”

 

Ben doesn’t even know how to respond. He can’t make sense of her words. Richard is Peter’s father; Richard is dead.

 

“His biological father,” says May.

 

Ben shakes his head. “We don’t …”

 

She hands him the piece of paper. He’s never seen this look in her eyes before; like she doesn’t need his forgiveness, but wants it anyway. “We do.”

 

He unravels the piece of paper, only recognizing Mary Parker’s writing because of the loops and the largeness of it. There are only three words: the name Tony Stark, and an email address.

 

“ _Stark?_ ”

 

May doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move a muscle. Just stares. “I promised Mary never to tell Peter,” she says quietly. “Never to tell anyone.”

 

Ben doesn’t need her to explain her reasoning. He just needs to wrap his head around it, when there is already far too much to wrap his head around, when it feels like he can’t even _breathe_.

 

“Does he know about Pete?”

 

May hesitates. “Yes,” she says.

 

Ben’s anger is immediate and unyielding. “Then he doesn’t _deserve_ to — “

 

“Ben,” says May, and only then do the tears return, welling up in her from some ancient, awful place that Ben doesn’t want to acknowledge, doesn’t want to let himself feel. _They are not losing their kid. They are not losing their kid. They are not …_

 

They’re finally allowed to see Peter; if it weren’t for the steady, rhythmic beating of the heart machine, Ben might have thought he was dead. Ben perches himself in a chair right beside him, and May pulls up another, and the two of them hold a silent, excruciating vigil, waiting for the kid to open his eyes.

 

Only after May nods off and Peter still hasn’t so much as twitched does Ben’s conscience get the better of him; he drafts an email that is almost brutal in its brevity.

 

_Stark,_

 

_My wife gave me your contact information. There’s something wrong with Peter; they’ve put him in an medically-induced coma, and it’s unclear whether or not he’ll wake up. She thought it was only fair that you were made aware._

 

_Ben Parker_

 

The hard part isn’t reaching out to the asshole who never bothered to be a part of Peter’s life; the hard part is typing out the words and reckoning with the awful truth of them. Their kid might never wake up. Their world might really fall apart this fast, this unfairly, and take Peter and all of his potential and unlived life with it.

 

At some point Ben must nod off too, because he wakes up to the sound of murmuring voices; by the time he fully registers his surroundings, a shadow has slipped out of the room and left a doctor that Ben doesn’t recognize, who is scrutinizing Peter’s chart and his vitals with a far more cutthroat confidence than the other doctors they spoke to before.

 

“Uh,” says Ben, his eyes still on the shadow that left the room. Is it — it couldn’t have been …?

 

“Hello, Mr. Parker. My name is Dr. Helen Cho, I was just reassigned to Peter’s case,” says the woman, reaching forward to shake Ben’s hand.

 

Ben takes it. Something is not quite right here but he takes it and he shakes.

 

“Don’t worry, Mr. Parker,” says Helen. Her fingers graze a spot on Peter’s neck, a little red bump that Ben forgets about in his panic almost as soon as he sees it. “Peter’s in good hands.”

 

Ben doesn’t have any reason to believe her, but he does. And then, sure enough, by some miracle beyond his comprehension, Peter comes back to them; he opens his eyes blearily by the next morning and shoots up like a rocket, so alert and so _okay_ that it has to be seen to be believed. Ben smiles and May cries and they all hug each other enough times that by the time they leave the hospital, thanking Dr. Cho profusely, they’re all a little bruised.

 

Life goes on, albeit a little more uneasily than before, but Ben does not forget the shadow from inside the hospital room that night. He does not forget the shadow when his lackluster insurance miraculously pays the full expenses of Peter’s medical bills. He does not forget the shadow when Peter asks innocently who all was in the hospital room that night. And he certainly does not forget the shadow when, over a month after the incident, Ben receives a reply to the email he sent.

 

_I need to talk to you about the kid._

 

Ben flags the email. He never decides whether or not to answer it; he is so concerned about Peter’s time that it never occurs to him to be concerned about his own.

 

* * *

 

 

A picture of a baby wrapped in a blanket, red-faced and chubby and wearing a blue hat.

 

_He’s yours. I don’t want or need anything from you. It just didn’t sit right with me not to let you know._

 

Tony has had that email from Mary Parker saved in an encrypted file for 15 years. There hasn’t been a day that he hasn’t thought of it since. It’s hard to believe that that strange little baby and the gangly teenage boy bleeding in his medical bay are one in the same.

 

Tony peers at him without reserve in a rare moment that Peter isn’t blinking back at him with those overeager eyes, and he almost hates how much he sees it — not of himself, or his father, but his mother, really. He sees her in the little upturn of Peter’s lips, in the cut of his cheeks. He sees it in that overflowing compassion, almost to a fault. Peter is far more Maria than he is Stark.

 

But Tony sees plenty of himself in Peter, too — some that he wish he didn’t. That same thirst to prove himself. That same insatiable curiosity and bullheadedness. That same crippling worry that he is going to hurt everyone he loves.

 

Tony has to look away from Peter then, out toward the expanse of the empty medical facility. It isn’t a worry; it’s a reality. Peter is hurt, and it’s Tony’s fault. It isn’t the first time, and the way things are headed, he knows it probably won’t be the last.

 

The first time it happens is still burned in Tony’s memory like a brand. He kept tabs on Peter over the years — of course he did, how couldn’t he? Maybe it was selfish of him, but particularly in his weakest moments — moments he hated himself most, moments he felt alone, moments he was drunk out of his mind and had no other place for his thoughts to go — he pulled up information about the kid. _His_ kid — well, not his. But a kid who is a kid because of him.

 

Tony could never decide if it made him feel better or worse. Because there was this kid, this dorky, happy, whip smart, goodhearted _kid_ that he helped put out in the world, a kid that is half of him — a kid whose goodness Tony can share absolutely none of the responsibility for.

 

 _See? He’s better off without me,_ Tony would justify in selfish moments. And in even more selfish, weaker moments: _At least I know I helped make one good thing._

 

Nobody contacted him when Richard and Mary Parker died, so Tony assumed that the secret of his relation to Peter died with them. Still, Tony tried to make good, or at least made an effort to start. Peter’s uncle never “won” those year-long pass tickets to the Stark Expo; Tony rigged it so he would, hoping he’d take Peter along with him.

 

He did. Tony even stopped and signed an autograph for the kid, feeling some strange, unfamiliar twinge in his chest when he saw him decked out in a mini Iron Man mask and gauntlets. He patted him on the head and went on his way and considered some time in the future when maybe he could be more than that, when maybe he would have enough of his shit together that he knew he could insert himself into an impressionable kid’s life without mucking it up Howard Stark-style.

 

Then, a few weeks later, the worst sight his eyes had ever seen — the very same kid poised in front of a drone four times his size, calmly looking his own death in the face as it locked in on the mask and prepared to end him.

 

Tony resolved to never contact him again after that.

 

But Tony has never been in a position to keep promises, not even the ones he makes to himself. The single email from Ben Parker came in. The meaning was all too clear. The kid was dying.

 

Tony found himself in a hospital room, staring down at Peter’s lifeless form like it was some kind of premonition. _You did this._ Except this time, he didn’t. This time he could help. He lingered just long enough that the image of Peter in that hospital bed next to his aunt and uncle would never quite leave his mind and then let Helen do her work.

 

A week later, a kid started fighting crime in Queens in his pajamas. _Don’t get involved_. Tony waited a few weeks, saw some footage of the kid barely dodging bullets, emailed Ben Parker back. A few days after that, Ben Parker was dead.

 

It’s been nearly a year since then, since Tony lost all semblance of control over the situation. Seeing Peter near death twice was more than enough for one lifetime — he found himself determined to, despite the kid’s best efforts, keep him alive. The suit. The AI. The Training Wheels and Baby Monitor protocols.

 

“Are you going to tell him?” asked May tremulously, when Tony first showed up at her door before Germany. The unspoken words: _You better fucking not be here to tell him._

 

“No,” said Tony.

 

“Then get out of my apartment.”

 

“There’s something I need you to see.”

 

She agreed, then, to let Tony be involved — only as Tony, and nothing more. But all the precaution in the world isn’t enough. Peter’s still unconscious with two holes burnt into his chest and his very angry aunt making her way upstate.

 

But in the two hours it take for her to get up here, Peter will be awake, and then walking it off, and then acting like it never happened. Peter will unintentionally make a mockery of all of Tony’s overblown worry, all of the nights he’s lost sleep imagining scenarios just like this afternoon, when Peter webbed his way into chaos in midtown and took a hit meant for someone else.

 

Peter groans, his hand unconsciously reaching for the bandaging on his chest. Tony stands abruptly and then hovers there, unsure whether or not he wants to be there when the kid wakes up.

 

He’s being ridiculous. He sits back down.

 

Sometimes he has this notion that Peter will one day look at him and just _know_. That he’ll see it written all over Tony’s face, and figure it out, and open the one box in Tony’s life he’s done everything he can to keep closed. But of course that’ll never happen. Even if Peter had a fleeting thought in that direction, he would never entertain it. This is one truth that is decidedly stranger than fiction.

 

Tony thinks sometimes that maybe he’ll tell the kid one day; other times he is certain he’ll never breathe a word. He can’t decide whether it will help him or hurt him. He knows the magnitude of what the kid has lost, of what he’s still scared to lose. He doesn’t want to be one more person he feels like he crashed into the life of, one more person he’s scared to let down.

 

But it’s slowly becoming that anyway, with or without he benefit of the truth. Tony sees the way Peter looks at him, that same constant need for approval, that same fierce loyalty, that same frustration to understand. And Tony — fuck. As much as he tries to distance himself from the kid, he can’t help it. He never could. It’s a baby picture, it’s a tiny Iron Man helmet, it’s a too small kid in a hospital bed. It’s a kindergarten school play pulled from another parent on YouTube, it’s a magnet school application hacked from a database, it’s a YouTube video of a scrawny red-and-blue clad kid soaring over Queens. The images on a constant loop, reminding him of everything he has to gain and everything he has to lose.

 

Peter’s eyes crack open and meet Tony’s so fast that he isn’t prepared for it.

 

“Oh man,” says Peter, his voice hoarse. “Is everyone else okay?”

 

Tony holds in a sigh.

 

“Yeah, kid. Except you. If you keep getting pummeled like this your grades are going to tank and there’s only so much my wealth and connections and absurd amount of power can do to pull weight at MIT.”

 

Peter offers him a weak, lopsided smile. “And my good looks?”

 

“Let’s not push our luck, shall we?”

 

Peter winces, tries to lean up, and then clearly thinks the better of it.

 

“Slow your roll, kid,” says Tony. And then, before he means to: “And maybe try to stop scaring the shit out of me for a month or so? Long enough for me to take up yoga or something? Find a safe place to secure my last shred of sanity?”

 

Peter’s eyes oscillate somewhere between guilty and apologetic before settling on something a little too close to resignation for Tony’s comfort. They both know he can’t do anything about that. And maybe that’s what Tony has struggled to accept the most; that bad things are going to happen to Peter. It doesn’t matter whether or not Tony is in Peter’s life — they’ll happen anyway. Tony stayed away from Peter for years in some backwards attempt to protect him, but he couldn’t stop Peter from losing his parents, from getting bitten by that spider, from hurtling face first into whatever trouble comes his way. Tony can only do what every other parent can do, and hope that he’s there fast enough to catch him when he falls.

 

Today was a closer call than others.

 

“I’ll do my best,” says Peter, his tone wry but his expression sincere.

 

Tony nods, another unspoken few words to Peter in the sea of them constantly churning in his mind: _So will I._

**Author's Note:**

> Hah, what, no, YOU'RE procrastinating on the final chapter of your unfinished fan fiction! (Guys I swear I am almost finished with it; this just fell out of my body on a long flight and demanded my attention and refused for the life of me to let go.)


End file.
